George Rebane

I have a bad feeling about the upcoming vote on healthcare – it may pass.  The legislation is so horrific that the progressives bent on bringing the next notch of authoritarianism to America are now going to “deem” the Senate’s bill into being without actually passing it.  The sleazebags are so brazen that they make no bones about going extra-constitutional in getting some form of Obamacare signed.  And the majority of Americans don’t even know what’s happening, and half of the remainder are actually promoting it.

In my lifetime, this is by far the most putrid sausage to come out of Washington.  This left-wing Congress needs to bribe, bend, and blindside to get something resembling nationalized healthcare into law.  No one today 16 March 2010 knows what the bill will be.  Pelosi has already publicly stated that ‘we have to pass it so you can see what it is’.  This is now the new norm in the partisan legislative process.  And we’re not talking about adding little amendments to administrivial bills to flush out clogged procedural pipes in Congress.  This is the biggest of the big kahunas to hit the nation in the last two generations.

Healthcare is definitely on the blink in this country, but not for the reasons that the progressives are touting.  It is not health insurance that is the cause, but the underlying costs of delivering healthcare that are out of control.  The causes for that have nothing to do with health insurance, and Obamacare purposely avoids any remedies to that part.  The biggest hunk of wool over our eyes is foisting the belief that this is all about providing better health care.

Astounding to me is the argument given by otherwise normal people that Obamacare is just more of what this government already does and what advanced nations around the world provide for their citizens.  But none of those programs are sustainable; not Medicare/Medicaid in the US or, for example, the cited and propagandized healthcare programs in EU countries.   All around the world, the year-to-year costs of socialized healthcare are increasing so that they consume an ever greater fraction of their nations’ GDPs.  This cannot go on.

The leftwing press will not report that the only, albeit futile, efforts to slow down this process in each country is to tighten the rationing screws.  On paper it still looks like all are getting equal care, but those who can afford it are taking ‘medical vacations’ and going where they can get the treatment they need. And business in SE Asia and the Caribbean is booming.  Yet our leftwing friends simply ignore all of this as they chant ‘O-baah-mah, O-baah-mah!’  Their man on a white horse has arrived.

An example close to home has one of our friends in Britain just taken off a two year list that she was on for a knee replacement.  Due to the pain, the woman is barely mobile and has been hobbling with a cane waiting for the new knee.  One of Britain’s ‘death committees’ told her perfunctorily that she was suddenly off the list, and within two months of the scheduled operation.  She is now in a panic looking for another EU country that might serve her while wondering how she will be able to pay for it.

Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin laid it all out in ‘Health Care in a Free Society’ , a short speech given on 13 January 2010 in Washington.  As someone said, if you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free.  Our beloved Republic trembles.